IN 2012, HAVING enjoyed eleven years of government financial assistance through its control of M&S, Random House Canada announced that it had now acquired the University of Toronto’s seventy-five per cent shares in M&S—for one dollar. Elaine Dewar’s 2017 book The Takeover is an interesting account of the loss of “The Canadian Publishers.” To some extent, the book answers my questions about how and names a few of the individuals who had so cleverly engineered the original deal.
My one remaining question is what took them so long.
In a long letter to Mordecai Richler, dated September 13, 1974, Jack McClelland wrote about his views on the American publishing presence in Canada.
There is no doubt in my mind that US publishers (and for that you could read British publishers and any other publishers because it has nothing to do with the USA per se) are a real problem in Canada. . . . A publisher operating a subsidiary in another country does not identify with the culture of that country. His purpose in having a subsidiary can only be twofold. First, he is interested in moving his publishing product, and second, he is interested in making money. Those are his sole objectives. . . . Nobody can object to those objectives. The problem in Canada, however, is the almost total takeover of the industry by foreign interests; this means that many vital forces in the cultural growth of the country can be lost because of inability to compete with massive foreign presence.
I am glad Jack was not alive to see “the house that Jack built” become part of a German subsidiary.